Oh, the feeling of relief when my tween daughters tugged me past Sephora and straight into a toy store, hunting for NeeDoh squishies.
Not Drunk Elephant moisturizer. Not fake nails. Not “anti-aging” serums marketed to middle schoolers.
I will happily spend my Saturday driving around looking for squishy blobs shaped like toast, dumplings and pickles. I will listen to breathless updates about which Learning Express just got a shipment and which Hallmark sold out in 14 minutes. I will fully participate in this absurd scavenger hunt because, beneath the hysteria, there is something unexpectedly sweet happening here.
Lisa Smith, who owns Parkway Presents in Northbrook, Illinois, says she’s watched the phenomenon pull families back into toy stores again.
“It’s like the old days,” Smith tells TODAY.com, comparing the frenzy to earlier fads like Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids. She says even longtime industry veterans are stunned by the scale of the demand.
But like most modern shopping crazes, the NeeDoh mania comes with a darker edge too. What began as harmless fun has spiraled into something stranger: grown adults cutting lines, screaming at store employees, threatening other customers, even calling the police on each other.
Recently, Smith posted a message to Instagram after a particularly chaotic NeeDoh drop, explaining that authorities had been called to the scene.
By 8:15 a.m., more than an hour before her store opened, Smith says she was already receiving frantic messages on social media warning that customers were cutting the line and fighting over numbered spots. When she rushed to Parkway Presents, she found roughly 200 people waiting outside.
“I was bombarded,” she recalls. “People kept coming up to me and saying, ‘This person cut,’ ‘This person threatened me,’ ‘This person videotaped me.’ I started shaking. I could not believe what was going on.”
After customers accused a man of cutting the line, Smith says he threatened to follow a woman home. During the dispute, Smith says the man’s wife later shoved another shopper, prompting someone in the crowd to call the police. The Northbrook Police Department confirmed to TODAY.com that they were dispatched to the store as Smith reported, but no charges were filed.
After the incident, Smith says she changed the way she handles NeeDoh releases. Instead of announcing drops ahead of time, the store posts on social media once the toys are already on shelves. The strategy, she says, has helped reduce crowds and confrontations.
Meanwhile, the madness, Smith says, hasn’t been limited to NeeDoh drops. Recently, she found herself in an argument with a customer over a squishy dumpling toy that retailed for about $11.
At the time, Parkway Presents was limiting shoppers to one dumpling per person so more children could get one. Smith says a woman tried to circumvent the rule by recruiting a stranger walking out of the eye doctor next door and bringing them into the store to buy a second dumpling on her behalf.
When employees refused to sell to her, the woman threatened legal action and later filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
“This is what I have to deal with,” Smith says, laughing in disbelief.
Even Schylling, the Massachusetts toy company behind NeeDoh, seems stunned by the frenzy. Paul Weingard, the company’s CEO, recently told Business Insider that Schylling sold through its entire yearly NeeDoh inventory within the first nine weeks of 2025 as demand surged far beyond what anyone anticipated.
“It’s been fantastic, overwhelming demand that just well outstrips our ability to replenish,” Weingard said.
The viral boom was compounded by factory shutdowns during Lunar New Year in China, where the toys are manufactured, making it even harder to restock shelves. Schylling told Business Insider it is ramping up production as quickly as possible and hopes to fully meet demand by summer.
Smith isn’t the only small business owner feeling overwhelmed.
In Kent, Washington, Anne Smith — another Smith in the increasingly unhinged universe of NeeDoh retail — who owns Retro Emporium, recently posted an Instagram message announcing she would temporarily stop stocking the toys altogether.
“We are a small shop, with a very small staff and cannot (and frankly, don’t want to) deal with the unruly and disrespectful behavior that tends to happen with these viral trends,” she wrote in a post that quickly spread online.
In a call with TODAY, Anne Smith says she initially enjoyed watching teenagers excited about toys again. But once NeeDoh exploded on TikTok, she says the mood changed almost immediately. Soon, she was fielding nonstop phone calls with hopeful buyers and resellers looking for product to sell at a markup, along with dealing with theft inside the store, resulting in empty squishy wrappers abandoned on shelves.
“Everything has to go to such an extreme now,” she says. “It’s more about the content than the actual thing.”
Which raises the obvious question: What is it about these rubbery little fidgets that makes otherwise rational people completely lose their minds?
Part of it is sensory, according to Lisa Smith of Parkway Presents. NeeDoh toys, soft, stretchy squishies that generally retail for less than $15, are deeply satisfying to hold. In an era of slime, fidget spinners and ASMR videos, the appeal feels almost inevitable. But there’s also the thrill of the hunt. Scarcity has transformed certain NeeDohs into status symbols.
And it’s not just elementary schoolers buying them. Smith says customers range from little kids to teenagers to adults, many of whom use them as stress-relief toys at work or while studying.
Unlike many internet-fueled kid crazes, this one still lives mostly in the physical world. My daughters aren’t just scrolling past NeeDohs online; they’re piling into the car with me and my husband, roaming malls, swapping tips about restocks and comparing finds in real life in the cafeteria.
Eventually, the squishies will lose their stickiness. The dumplings will burst. The pickles will disappear beneath couch cushions alongside every other forgotten treasure before them.
But for now, I’m just thrilled my daughters are excited about $10 toys instead of retinol.
And Lisa Smith agrees: the kids seem to be handling this whole thing just fine. It’s the adults who need to get it together.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
